Powering strategy with innovation

Many European companies have led the way in terms of innovation. But innovation is by no means confined to GT40 companies covered in our analysis or to Europe. AES Corporation, based in the US, runs a diverse power-generation and distribution portfolio. But in a joint venture with Siemens, it is claiming a major stake in the burgeoning global energy-storage market, which is forecast to grow at around 7% a year to more than US$13bn by 2022.3 

Bernerd Da Santos, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of AES, described the lead his company has taken: “Last year we deployed 776MW of energy storage worldwide, and we are building the largest battery energy-storage facility in the world, a 100MW, four-hour-duration unit in California. We are also leaders in the US in the application of drones, second only to NASA. We are using drones to improve safety by reducing hazards across our work and increasing the availability and productivity of our energy solutions.”

However, Da Santos emphasises that innovation is nothing without adaptation and adoption. “People have to adopt the technology or the platform. Otherwise you are going nowhere.” In the case of utility-scale battery storage, AES finds itself with some ready adopters as industrial customers seek to safeguard the security of supply and utility customers seek answers to system balancing problems.

thyssenkrupp’s Carbon2Chem® project is an example of a cross-industrial circular economy initiative involving players from chemical energy and steel sectors, where thyssenkrupp is seeking to re-use more top gases from the blast furnace, coke oven and steel mill to produce chemicals, resulting in less CO2 generation.  

thyssenkrupp is investing around €60m into the project alongside other partners from chemical and energy industries. The project is preparing for industrial scale-up during 2020, ahead of commercial implementation but both the technical and wider challenges are considerable. The current emissions trading scheme is for existing technologies and there is no current CO2 tax structure that is right for this cross-industry initiative. While industry is highly committed to this project, additional societal and government support is needed.  

Partnering also critical for the digital space

The roundtable also discussed digitalisation initiatives and the importance of partnering was highlighted by Thomas Hillebrand, a board member of the Digital Asset Association Austria (DAAA), who commented “Partnering through open innovation is crucial. A lot of in-house IT capacity is a suboptimal base for innovation. If you go into partnerships with startups or other tech companies, you create new concepts much faster. De-risking it by taking it off balance sheet and out of yearly budgets can be a game-changer for innovation initiatives.”